How to Save the World

Sir David Attenborough Has Reunited With the Creators of Planet Earth for New Netflix Series Our Planet. Here, They Reveal How the Show Will Inspire People to Save Our Beautiful Home…

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What makes Our Planet different from other natural history shows that you’ve worked on? Alastair Fothergill Having completed Planet Earth, Blue Planet and Frozen Planet, the time was right to do a series that dealt with our planet’s environmental and ecological challenges. If there’s any chance of preserving biodiversity, what are the ‘must-saves’? Keith Scholey In the grasslands episode, for example, it’s about space. Most of the great migrations have disappeared because we took that space away. We say: “If you want to make space for grasslands, this is what you have to do.” It’s actually quite simple – it’s all about the food we eat. If people change their diet or we change the way we produce food, we can have a huge amount more space for nature. This is the principle of the whole series. Then, within each show, we highlight individual animals. Like the orangutans in the jungles of Borneo: if we carry on the way we are, this will be the last generation of wild orangutans. That’s about space. You’ve explored the natural world more than most, but you’ve also witnessed its destruction first-hand. From that, what have you learned that we should know? David Attenborough Everybody should realise that this is not just because I like dicky birds. You, me and the rest of the human species are critically dependent on the health of the natural world. If the seas stop producing oxygen, we would be unable to breathe, and there is no food that we can digest that doesn’t originate from the natural world. If we damage the natural world, we damage ourselves.